A lot happened this year and our team at Good Faith Media has been on top of it since the beginning. Early this year, we asked our staff writers and contributing correspondents to share with readers the stories they will be following in 2024. Although many of these stories are still playing out, revisiting them can be a helpful end-of-year exercise.
2024 Presidential Election
As the calendar turned to the new year, the presidential election was on everyone’s mind. Although he didn’t participate in any primary debates and did very little campaigning, former President Donald Trump was already well on his way to securing the Republican nomination.
President Joe Biden’s official announcement in April 2023 that he would seek reelection cleared the Democratic field of any significant challenges, setting up a rematch of the 2020 contest. However, after a disastrous debate performance and a weeks-long pressure campaign from Democratic activists, Biden pulled out of the race and soon was replaced on the ticket with his Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Despite the historic shakeup in the race, the fundamentals remained the same. Many of the questions we asked were as relevant in a Trump v. Harris race as they were with Trump v. Biden.
In our “Stories to Watch” feature, contributing correspondent Randall Balmer asked readers to keep their eyes on whether evangelical voters would stick with Donald Trump. “If they support him in anything like the numbers in 2016 and 2020,” he wrote, “he has a very good chance of winning the electoral vote.”
Despite Trump’s signature confusing rhetorical flexibility (taking credit for his legacy in overturning Roe vs. Wade while simultaneously distancing himself from it) and the evangelical X-verse feigning outrage at his waffling over abortion, they did stick with him, delivering Trump the election.
According to data from PRRI, 85% of evangelicals cast their vote for Trump. He didn’t just regain their vote from 2020 when 75% of evangelicals voted for them. He also improved upon his 81% vote from that group in 2016.
Trump performatively distanced himself from the Christian nationalism found in Project 2025, a concern former GFM managing editor Bruce Gourley drew our attention to moving into 2024. Having evangelicals in his back pocket allowed him to do this to make gains among other groups skeptical of the MAGA movement.
Regardless, Trump has embraced many of the writers responsible for Project 2025 since the election by nominating them to important administration posts.
Mitch Randall, GFM’s CEO, drew readers’ attention to the advances in Artificial Intelligence. He noted, “With the presidency and control of Congress hanging in the balance, AI will most certainly be a player in attempting to secure votes.” Randall asked, “How will voters decide what is real or fake?”
This was an excellent question at the beginning of the year, but it gave way to an even more important one as the campaign rolled along: “Do voters care what is real or fake?” A study during the election found that many of Trump’s supporters were likely to believe a lie on social media if the platform labeled it “disputed.”
Since the election, many analysts have suggested the Democratic party’s primary failure was their embracing of “woke” policies, a term stolen from African American civil rights advocates and reconfigured by MAGA adherents to mean “weird.” Many Americans feel that Trump embracing the alleged masculinity of personalities like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk offered a counterbalance to this.
Starlette Thomas, GFM’s Associate Editor and Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, drew attention to Musk as a canary in the coal mine in our “Stories to Watch” piece. She noted that, at the end of 2023, Musk tweeted, “DEI must die,” referring to corporate initiatives created after George Floyd’s death to expand diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.
According to Thomas, these corporate promises “were largely reactive.” She noted that, in the coming year, she’ll “continue to watch what companies do rather than what they say regarding the sociopolitical construct of race.”
The term “DEI” was a significant factor in the election, with many labeling Kamala Harris, one of the most qualified candidates to ever run for President, a “DEI hire.”
With Trump threatening to withhold federal funding from any educational or corporate entity that utilizes formal DEI initiatives, many organizations are formally discontinuing these programs. Thomas wrote about Walmart’s recent decision to roll back its DEI efforts due to threats from conservative activists.
At the beginning of 2024, contributing correspondent Justin Cox was intrigued by the April release of the Alex Garland film Civil War. Cox suggested the film could be prescriptive about our national direction or possibly “stoke the fires and be a blueprint for extremists, Christian nationalists, and far-right patriots.”
I saw “Civil War” in the theater. One of the most alarming questions it raised, which feels even more prescient after the election, was whether anyone would know who to trust in a modern-day civil war.
Israel’s War in Gaza
By the time January rolled around, Israel was almost three months into its retaliatory war against Hamas in Gaza. At that point, around 22,000 Palestinians had been killed in the conflict, a number that would double in the coming year. Elements of this story were on top of the minds of contributing editor Tony Cartledge and contributing correspondent Miguel A. De La Torre.
Cartledge wrote, “It will be essential to understand the roots of issues between Israelis and Palestinians.” He added, “Many Americans are either misinformed or under-informed about what has been happening in Israel and the West Bank for the past 75 years.”
Cartledge wrote an informative piece on this in the March/April issue of our Nurturing Faith Journal. With the incoming Trump administration nominating Christian Zionists like Mike Huckabee, a former pastor who once said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” it seems likely that not enough Americans have heeded Cartledge’s call for education.
De La Torre drew attention to this ironic alliance between American evangelicals and Israel. He wrote, “Those who are considered Zionism’s best friends— evangelicals—have a worldview (or end-of-times fantasy) where the Final Solution is fulfilled during the ‘second coming’ by having all Jews thrown in the ‘lake of fire.’”
He was also concerned about how the definition of anti-semitism “is radically changing to silence those who call out human rights violations occurring in Palestine.”
This has proven to be a challenge in writing about the war. No matter how much many of them affirm Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, or condemn the actions of terrorists, accusations of antisemitism almost always follow any content that even tangentially critiques Israel’s military action in Gaza.
LGBTQ+ Issues
Having had many loved ones who belong to Wesleyan-descended churches, I began the year interested in how the United Methodist Church (UMC) would address LGBTQ+ inclusion in its quadrennial General Conference meeting.
The move seemed like a certainty, with the creation of the Global Methodist Church (GMC) pulling away most of the opposition to changing the Methodist Book of Discipline. In the years leading up to 2024, many churches in the U.S., including those in my native East Texas, voted to join the GMC in a move that created wounds and separated friends and families.
Even though most assumed the UMC would fully welcome LGBTQ+ individuals into all aspects of church life, the ease with which this happened shocked many. A friend of mine, who attended the assembly, noted that it took a while for many people in the room where the decision was made to even know what had happened.
The story was joyful for many but also painful for those who had given up on their beloved UMC long ago after years of pressing for change. In May, Rev. Courtney Jones voiced this grief in a GFM piece titled “Dispatches from the United Methodist Diaspora.”
In the “Stories to Watch” article, contributing correspondent Kali Cawthon-Freels wrote about a 2023 action by the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which sought to apply arcane “public decency standards” to an ordinance that would ban LGBTQ+ Pride festivities.
Cawthon-Freels wrote that “it will be interesting to see if anti-LGBTQ+ groups in Tennessee will cite this ordinance in attempts to ban events like this year’s Murfreesboro Pride parade and if other cities across the country will attempt to follow suit.”
In a rare stroke of good news for 2024, a judge struck down the enforcement of the ordinance in February. In addition, the City of Murfreesboro agreed to pay $500,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which sponsors the city’s pride parade.
Murfreesboro held its annual Pride Parade on January 29.
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